The Authors Guild is asking authors to contact them if their publisher did not register their book’s copyright and they believe that failure led to their book being excluded from the Bartz v Anthropic settlement. Learn more.
I’ve often wondered if this failure calls for a lawsuit of its own, but it’s unclear to me—as it is to the Authors Guild—what the scope of the problem might be. After all, if you could’ve been a class member in Bartz except for lack of copyright registration, who would have notified you? Not class counsel and not your publisher.
So far, Macmillan is the only publisher that has agreed to reimburse authors who would have qualified for the settlement.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
